sign in sign up
<<
Home , Diegesis, Mimesis, Mode (literature)

OFFSCREEN :: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007

Discourses on

The Success Story of a Misnomer

By Henry M. Taylor

Diegesis refers to , the content of the , the fictional world as described inside the story. In film it refers to all that is really going on on-screen, that is, to fictional reality.

- Susan Hayward

Diegesis, and its various adjectival forms, diegetic, non-diegetic, meta- diegetic, homo-diegetic etc., have long functioned in literary and film studies as fetish or code words separating the cognoscenti of these disciplines from the general, "ignorant" public. To those on the outside, these terms must sound like cryptic jargon, a situation somewhat reminiscent of the mid-80s, when only the initiated knew what the acronym MS-DOS stood for. Yet it may come as something of a surprise that the highly successful term diegetic is really a misnomer. In the third book of The (Politeia), distinguishes between two kinds of narrative: the simple narrative (haple diegesis), featuring a narrator speaking directly in his own, undisguised voice, and , or imitative

1 of 5 OFFSCREEN :: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007

representation, in which the author speaks indirectly, i.e. through other characters. Plato is critical of as imitation, regarding it as dangerous since it simply copies the appearance of the real, providing us only with reproductions of shadows; hence mimesis is an inferior, degraded form of . This is, of course, ironic, as Plato himself in his dialogues does not speak to us directly, but through the voice of . All this changes with Plato's pupil , who, in his , recontextualizes and expands the significance of mimesis and mimetic narrative. Mimesis now does not reproduce reproductions (or shadows), but reality itself, and hence it is a first and not second order imitation. Reading Aristotle with Paul Ricœur (in the latter's Time and Narrative), we could say that any kind of creation of poetic worlds is mimetic. Aristotle still adheres to Plato's term diegesis, but reassigns it to the of mimesis: hence, while all narrative is mimesis in the wider sense, the simple or direct narrative (as in voice-over narration in film) is diegetic mimesis, whereas dramatic representations (of actors in a scene, for instance) are, strictly speaking, mimetic mimesis. Therefore, mimesis in Aristotle is the umbrella term designating all poetic representation. Alas, for a variety of , what should have been called mimesis and mimetic came to be designated by the terms diegesis and diegetic. In film studies, before the academic discipline was established as such, the French term diégèse was introduced around 1950 by Etienne and Anne Souriau, even if there is some dispute about its precise origin. According to Gérard Genette, it was Etienne

2 of 5 OFFSCREEN :: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007

Souriau who first used the term in 1948; whereas Anne Souriau claims in the Vocabulaire d'esthétique to have coined it herself in 1950; and David Bordwell in his Narration in the Film refers to Etienne Souriau's introduction of the concept in a widely known 1953 publication, which is presumably appropriate regarding the expression's historical reception. This dispute notwithstanding, the English terms diegesis and diegetic, referring to the spatial story worlds primarily of fictional texts/films, are of the French words diégèse and diégétique — the matter complicated by the fact that Genette (aligning himself with Etienne Souriau) asserts that these terms are not derived from the Greek diegesis. Of course, by now this terminology has been so well established that it would be futile not to use it in its accustomed sense. It has been particularly useful in designating aspects and features of filmic sound as it relates to the relatively closed story-worlds of fiction (regarding non-fiction, and the documentary in particular, the terms remain somewhat problematic). A variant that I first heard of in the early 90s, and that may have been coined at Zurich University's film studies department, is the expression transdiegetic, referring to sound's propensities to cross the border of the diegetic to the non-diegetic and remaining unspecific. A good example can be found in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (USA 1979): when the PT boat crew member played by Laurence Fishburne turns up the radio playing the Stones song "Satisfaction," the music (at first simply located in on-screen space) swells, thereby encompassing on- and off-screen space; a similar

3 of 5 OFFSCREEN :: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007

phenomenon can be observed in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (UK 1989), when, after the victorious battle at Agincourt, one of the English soldiers (played by the film's composer, Patrick Doyle) starts singing "Non Nobis," before the rousing chant is picked up by what is in effect a phantom choir and orchestra on the soundtrack. The term transdiegetic, therefore, reveals that filmic sound, unlike the image, is not place-specific and delimitated, and acts not solely to weld the images together (across shot edits), but also to engulf the spectator in the filmic experience. Plato would not have approved.

______

Sources Cited:

Aristotle. (1997). Poetics (Malcolm Heath, Trans). Penguin Classics ed. Reprint. London: Penguin. Bordwell, David. (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Genette, Gérard. (1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited (Jane E. Lewin, Trans). Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press. – Originally published as: Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Hayward, Susan. (1996). Key concepts in cinema studies. London: Routledge. Plato. (1996). The Republic (Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott, Trans.). Norton paperback ed. New York: Norton. – This ed. first published: 1985. Ricœur, Paul. (1990). Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Trans.). Paperback ed. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – Previously published: 1984. Originally published as: Temps et récit, tome 1. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

4 of 5 OFFSCREEN :: Vol. 11, Nos. 8-9, Aug/Sept 2007

Souriau, Etienne. (1990). Vocabulaire d'esthétique. Publié sous la direction de Anne Souriau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

______

Bio:

Henry M. Taylor (*1965), Dr.phil., Research Fellow in Film Studies at the University of Zurich. He is the author of a book on biographical films (Rolle des Lebens. Die Filmbiographie als System, Marburg: Schueren Verlag, 2002), and on Franco-Argentinian filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky (Der Krieg eines Einzelnen. Eine filmische Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte, Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 1995). Numerous lectures at the Universities of Konstanz (Germany), Zurich, and Lucerne (Switzerland). His current research deals with conspiracy culture and the paranoid in film and television.

5 of 5